Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May makes a speech at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies in central London while on the General Election campaign trail. Monday June 5, 2017. The British electorate will vote in a general election on Thursday. (Andrew Matthews/PA via AP)

“We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed – yet that is precisely what the internet, and the big companies that provide internet-based services provide.

“We need to work with allied democratic governments to reach international agreements to regulate cyberspace to prevent the spread of extremist and terrorism planning.”

The inherent problem with regulating the internet for content is that it is decentralized. Unless Great Britain were to go the way of, say, China or North Korea, restricting content on the entire internet is no easy feat.

Side note: She could just make everyone in Britain sign up for Facebook’s Internet Basics service, which gives you free access to only a handful of online sites. But that would include Facebook, so if the goal is to keep hate speech from spreading, maybe this isn’t the best option.

May says what it would take for her ambitious idea to take hold: international cooperation. No two countries have the same policies regarding freedom of speech, and I dare say no other country allows greater freedom than the United States. (We’ve got that going for us, which is nice.)

The European Union has laws against online hate speech. Would the U.S., in solidarity with our partners across the Atlantic, adopt a similar crackdown?

People who believe in vile, hateful and extremist causes can find an audience and camaraderie online. The question we need to ask ourselves is: Is this still an acceptable price to pay in the name of completely free expression?

I don’t know the answer, but I’d love to hear your thoughts. Start a discussion in the comments.

Digital Watch is a blog about technology, media and anything that fits in those categories. Send feedback, hate mail and tips to arichter@readingeagle.com. Find me on Twitter: @AdamRichterRE.

The weekend is here, so before you head to the beach/amusement park/escape room of your choice, I thought I’d saddle you with some recent news on the BBI (boring but important) issue of net neutrality.

Net neutrality, in case you don’t read this blog regularly or watch John Oliver, is the principle that internet service providers must treat all online content equally, and not favor one form or service over another. Comcast can’t throttle Netflix just because it wants you to watch a streaming service it prefers, for instance.

Or, as I like to think of it: Yet another issue where we are all doomed.

When the Federal Communications Commission wrote the rules for net neutrality, it classified broadband internet access as telecommunications, so it could enforce said rules under what’s known as Title II. But new Commissioner Ajit Pai was an opponent of the FCC’s plan in 2015 when he was just a commission member. Now that he’s in charge, he wants to change the rules by redefining the term “broadband.” From the article:

Broadband is an information service because ISPs give customers the ability to visit social media websites, post blogs, read newspaper websites, and use search engines to find information, the FCC’s new proposal states. Even if the ISPs don’t host any of those websites themselves, broadband is still an information service under Pai’s definition because Internet access allows consumers to reach those websites.

How will this new definition allow ISPs to treat all these different forms of content differently? Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, over at Oxford University Press, James Cortada reminds us that we’ve been fighting this battle, or others strikingly similar, since the beginning of this country. What’s different now is that the stakes over privacy are higher than they’ve ever been:

The central issues involving the Internet—data security, privacy, and net neutrality—have now been before the public for over two decades. But Americans have not become as engaged with them as they should. They ought to do so now, as these will need to be addressed head-on over the next several years. Recent evidence of the Trump administration putting these at risk is more an intensification of a debate rather than the introduction of a new conversation. But that intensification teaches us that to ignore these issues is to invite a circumstance when it may become too late to reverse course.

Small comfort, I know. To make your comfort even smaller, there was this tidbit from DSL Reports:

I said earlier that the battle over net neutrality — the radical concept that content on the internet should be treated with equal lack of regard by internet service providers — was far from over. What I didn’t realize was that we’d be re-litigating it from square one.

But such is the reality in which we find ourselves these days. Anything worth doing is worth doing over. New FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has said the existing regulations, which classify ISPs as Title II carriers (thus putting them under the jurisdiction of the FCC, which can enforce net neutrality), are “a serious mistake.”

So Pai, who was one of two FCC commissioners to vote against the new FCC rule when Tom Wheeler was the chairman, wants to undo the policy put in place by his old boss.

I’ve written often about the complicated issue of net neutrality and the need for customers to have some kind of protection from ISPs who, could left unchecked, could play favorites with content providers. But now that the FCC is run by someone with an antipathy toward regulation, the most significant rule regarding the internet to come along in at least a decade could disappear.

The great comedian John Oliver this week had a lengthy but worthwhile analysis of what’s at stake with this new fight. And before you ask:

The first step toward solving a problem is admitting you have one, so the conventional wisdom goes. Facebook, it seems, has taken that first step when it comes to acknowledging that many, many people fall for hoax stories that appear in their feed. (I have another word for these stories that I can’t print here: it rhymes with “full snit”.)

This week the social media giant (or digital ad-agency behemoth, if you prefer) announced plans to add a new feature to the news feed that it hopes will help readers determine if a story is true or a hoax. Soon it will roll out a Related Articles feature that will show links to other stories beneath a post that might verify, fact-check or contradict what the original post says.

That’s a noble effort. But I submit that the problem of news hoaxes permeating the Facebook ecosystem has more to do with the ecosystem than with gullible users. The social network is a closed system that discourages leaving. Several years ago, in fact, Facebook rolled out its Instant Articles feature for publishers, ostensibly so their news articles would load faster. What it also does, though, is keep people from leaving Facebook and exploring a site elsewhere on the internet. Publishers gained the advantage of fast page loads on mobile devices — which sounds nerdy but is critically important if you’re a publisher — but they didn’t gain much in the way of revenue. As Casey Newton points out in an April 16 Verge article:

Facebook was careful not to guarantee that publishers would see expanded reach from Instant Articles. But it seemed likely that Facebook would favor the instant links, given that the articles loaded up to 10 times faster and kept users glued to the company’s flagship app. “In the beginning, having access to Instant will provide a huge advantage over publications that don’t,” wrote John Herrman, whose Content Wars series in The Awl had warned publishers that Facebook would ultimately change the terms of any deal to benefit itself. “Eventually, publishers’ numbers will even out as competition increases.”

The problem with a closed ecosystem is that diversity eventually gives way to homogeneity. Facebook has become an effective echo chamber for people on the left and the right to reinforce their views and demonize the other side.

That might have happened over the last decade with or without Facebook. But the only way to keep the social network from becoming an unwitting disseminator of bogus news is to have people stop getting their news from Facebook.

How they do that is anybody’s guess.

Digital Watch is a blog about technology, media and anything that fits in those categories. Send feedback, hate mail and tips to arichter@readingeagle.com. Find me on Twitter: @AdamRichterRE.

It’s also Earth Day and the March For Science, but I’m trying to stay focused here.

Should you decide to patronize your friendly neighborhood record store, don’t just do it for the collectibles. All the Record Store Day releases are novel and interesting, but they’re also more expensive than other albums you might find today.

Pick up that David Bowie live box set if you must, but also see what other new releases the store has. Check out the used collection. Go through the dollar bin.

I found this gem for $1 at a record store several years ago. It’s in great shape and features some of the best-known American classical music.

You don’t need to spend your grocery budget on records. It’s a hobby that can be as expensive or as cheap as you want it to be.

For the collector, Record Store Day should just be a day to reinforce what you already do on a regular basis: Go to a store and find interesting music.

If you’re not a collector, let this be an introduction to the vast universe of records at your disposal. All you need is a turntable and some curiosity.

Seriously: Check out the dollar bin. You never know what undervalued gems you might find.

This week Facebook held its annual developer conference, also known as F8. You won’t get a new Like, but you might get to use Facebook to see objects that aren’t there.

For a social network that was heavily criticized for its role in propagating fake news during the last election, Facebook seems to have little regard for keeping reality as it is. Most of the innovations that the company announced this week dealt with virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), ostensibly as a way to connect people who aren’t in the same physical space. Fortune.com has a succinct breakdown of the biggest changes coming to the social media behemoth.

AR, by the way, is the same technology that’s used in the game “Pokemon Go,” assuming anyone still plays that. It lets you put virtual objects in a real-world environment. So you can post a photo of you eating a beluga whale while wearing a squid hat, even though in reality you aren’t doing any such thing.

From Fortune.com:

Facebook says its AR platform will eventually make it possible to leave a virtual note for a friend at a restaurant or create artwork that appears on a building wall when looking at it with your phone.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg also announced the launch of Facebook Spaces, a VR environment where users can interact in a virtual environment. Again, Fortune explains it best:

Through the app, which launches in beta on Tuesday, users can create a digital avatar, then chat and interact with friends in VR. Facebook will generate an avatar based on your photos, which you can customize. During these hangouts, participants can draw with virtual markers, watch 360-degree videos, and call other friends through Messenger.

It makes sense that Facebook would want to lead the way in these new forms of technology. It’s the largest social network and has 1 billion users already in place for whatever experiments it wants to try. But as users, we should be wary of these changes. The minutes we spend on Facebook count as time we’re not doing other tasks, including interacting with the real world around us.

Thanks to social media, the past several years have shown that plenty of people have the ability to see things that don’t exist in the real world. We don’t need AR or VR to become part of everyday experience to the point where the line between fact and fiction becomes even more hazy.

These are not tools that will help you. They are tools that will help Facebook.

I’ll explore the company’s evolution from social network to something else entirely in my column this Saturday in the Reading Eagle.

Digital Watch is a blog about technology, media and anything that fits in those categories. Send feedback, hate mail and tips to arichter@readingeagle.com. Find me on Twitter: @AdamRichterRE.

Well, if you don’t like it then stop using the internet. Going online is a choice, not a necessity.

That’s the argument put forth, according to Talking New Media, by one Congressman who voted for the bill, signed into law April 3 by President Donald Trump. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, told his constituents “Nobody’s got to use the internet” in defending his vote.

I suppose he’s got a point. Many people use the internet, but many people also do not. But if you connect with friends via Facebook, argue with strangers over Twitter, download songs from iTunes, watch movies over Netflix and read newspapers on a tablet, smartphone or old-fashioned computer, you do, in fact, need the internet.

Oh, yeah: Also if you pay bills, surf the Web, email your mom or play multiplayer games on your phone.

Of course, as Sensenbrenner points out, those are all optional. You don’t HAVE to do any of that, if you don’t want the companies that provide you with internet access to be able to sell your information.

I wrote previously about this topic, so I won’t rehash my thoughts on the bill here. But it’s worth noting that all the congressmen who represent Berks County voted with Sensenbrenner in support of the law.

In 2011, the United Nations declared that internet access is a human right. Three years later, then-Secretary of State John Kerry made the same argument.

But we’re in a new era, and who knows if U.S. policy will change on this matter. Internet access might go from being a declared human right to just another service, like HBO, that you have the right to if you can afford it.

This past Saturday I was invited to be part of a panel discussion called “Real News vs. Fake News and How to Tell the Difference,” hosted by the League of Women Voters in Reading. The two-hour event, which also featured Reading Eagle News Editor Karol Gress and Reading Area Community College professor Dr. Jessica Hughes, was a lively discussion on what counts as fake news, how to recognize it and how both news organizations and news consumers can fight it.

That last question was especially difficult, and I’m not sure there is an answer. I’ve written before about how to spot news hoaxes. As my colleague Karol pointed out, news outlets combat the hoaxes by having both reporters and editors view everything with a skeptical eye. Verify, verify, verify.

What if you are a news consumer? How skeptical should you be? I quipped during the panel that perhaps readers need to adopt the old newsroom aphorism, “If your mother calls you Sonny, check it out.” But what good is that? Can the mainstream media urge the public to doubt everything they read, except for mainstream news?

That’s the conundrum that Dr. Hughes raised during her talk. She discussed an essay published earlier this year by tech researcher Danah Boyd, called “Did Media Literacy Backfire?” The essay, which you can read here, argues that in encouraging everyone to become media savvy, we’ve made readers skeptical in unexpected ways. So Wikipedia is an untrustworthy source but Google is OK. Or doctors who insist vaccines don’t cause autism are not to be believed, but a discredited article in a medical journal is legit.

And some population groups have a reason to be skeptical of authoritative voices, even if what those voices are saying is true.

This is why people can fall for news hoaxes, particularly if they come from sources outside the “distrustful” mainstream media.

So what is the answer? I don’t know. I don’t think solving the problem will be easy or quick. But perhaps I oversimplified things by saying that news consumers need to be skeptical.

OK, fine. Don’t doubt everything you read. Such extremism simply leads to a never-ending downward spiral into uncertainty and despair. There is hope, however.

One point I made during the panel discussion was that so many news hoaxes play on the reader’s emotions by generating outrage. If you run across one of those stories (“Illegal aliens kill Supreme Court Justice at the border, impose Sharia Law!”), ask yourself:

Is this really true?

Then take a deep breath and see if you can find other sources. I’m not encouraging you to doubt everything; just question stories that instantly make you mad.

That won’t solve the problem, but it’s a start. Short of any long-term solutions, we have to start somewhere.

You might think that sharing stories on Facebook doesn’t do a thing to move the needle on social progress. Oh, how wrong you are.

In its latest episode, “Saturday Night Live” shows just how much a difference that online slacktivism can make with the catchy song, “Thank You, Scott.” It’s a paean to the guy who watches the news, gets outraged, and finally does something about it by sharing a news article on Facebook. Louis C.K., the episode’s host, plays Scott, a role that pretty much involves sitting on a couch playing with his smartphone. He’s a perfect everyman for this sendup.

Will it make a difference? Will it cause people to do more than just post on Facebook, whether out of guilt, shame or a newfound wokeness? Those are questions for another day. For now, just watch the video and enjoy this brilliant piece of satire.

Those four words summarize the core principle behind net neutrality, the codified (for now) policy of the Federal Communications Commission. Internet service providers aren’t allowed to favor one provider’s content — whether text, images, audio or video — over that of another provider when delivering it to the customer.

Zero rating — a way to give preferential treatment to some kinds of data use — is touted by advocates as a means to give customers the ability to stream video without running over the data caps on their smartphone contracts. It’s how T-Mobile offers its BingeOn program, for instance. But BingeOn is possible because T-Mobile favors some content. You can get Netflix, for example, but if you want to start your own streaming video service, you might not get access to T-Mobile’s platform.

While network neutrality remains a contentious issue, zero rating should not be viewed as market exploitation, nor as a violation of the nondiscrimination principle. Certainly, the industry players who have come together in such programs do not see it as such. Instead, it is a marketplace solution that stands to meet many of the internet policy objectives the FCC and regulatory agencies around the world desire: cheaper rates, greater access, greater customer choice and a wider array of applications and a la carte choices in multichannel TV programming.

Binge On favors video streaming over all other Internet uses, even those that use the same amount of bandwidth or less. As long as Binge On gives special treatment to video as a class, it undermines the vision of an open Internet where all applications have an equal chance of reaching audiences, and people, not ISPs, choose how to use the bandwidth available to them.
If left unchecked, Binge On leads us down a slippery slope. As other ISPs offer similar programs, the cumulative harms will change the Internet as we know it. More and more ISPs will become gatekeepers that pick winners and losers online, distorting competition for an increasing number of Internet users. Innovators will now need to work with ISPs around the world to join their zero rating programs – all just for an equal chance to compete. Small players, non-commercial speakers, and start-ups without the resources to engage numerous ISPs across the globe will be left behind.
This will end the era of “innovation without permission” – an important principle that has allowed innovation to flourish on the Internet up until now.

I encourage you to read both papers and draw your own conclusions. As I’ve written before, nothing is ever as simple as we think it was in the old days. The internet is no exception.